NYPD implores citizens to submit photo and video evidence

Tired of the fuzz body-checking you right off your bike during Critical Mass rides? Well lucky you, New York Police Commish Ray Kelly is responding by flipping the switch on user-generated crime reports, enabling ordinary citizens to submit photos and video as evidence of criminal activity. Granted, we think it's always been the case that people could dial-a-detective if they've got a hot lead on a crime, but here Kelly specifically referred to the "fact of life" that nowadays "everybody has a camera in their telephones. When people can record an event taking place that helps us during an investigation, it's helpful." Details are not yet clear, like how much manpower it's going to take to weed through the billions of tattle-tale clips that will inevitably be sent in of Sbux line-cutters, or what codecs the NYPD will support (fingers crossed for motion-JPEG and 3GPP).

[Via The Raw Feed]

[hotpuck6 Posted Aug 2nd 2008 11:38AM]

So.....
Who wants to RickRoll the NYPD?

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 2nd 2008 12:14PM]

Imagine this (lots of photos from different angles/times) + Photosynth.
That sounds "helpful", and it's automated, I think...

http://labs.live.com/photosynth

[sam1am Posted Aug 2nd 2008 1:25PM]

When someone does something that helps, it's helpful.

Intensely profound logic from New York's finest.

[sinai Posted Aug 2nd 2008 1:40PM]

as a full time pedestrian, i'm going on record as saying bike riders are assholes and think they own the road. this one bike-douche cut me off and started cussing me out like i was going to be causing him damage had he run into me.

so when i hear one of these jackasses got body-checked by a cop and can't do shit about it, i'm sort of happy.

[psyclotron Posted Aug 2nd 2008 2:05PM]

as someone who drives, motorcycles, bicycles, buses, trains, ferries, and everything in between, i can honestly say, fuck you; YOU are part of the problem and only know how to blame others

[psyclotron Posted Aug 2nd 2008 2:46PM]

p.s. there's plenty of douchebag pedestrians out there, listening to their ipods as they jaywalk the busiest intersections, and everything else, but you don't see me bigotedly advocating violence against entire groups of people like you.

if you see everyone else as an enemy, they probably will be.

[sinai Posted Aug 2nd 2008 3:10PM]

sorry for not being a cop-hating douche. i know it's the cool thing to do.

[psyclotron Posted Aug 2nd 2008 3:17PM]

way to totally completely miss the fucking point, or are you intentionally full of shit. it must be painful to be that spiteful and ignorant

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 2nd 2008 2:34PM]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008074874_webcriticalmass26m.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/04/04/BAGF7P12RN23.DTL

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 2nd 2008 8:32PM]

Or post stories of the much more frequent occurrence of hopped up pissed off drivers that intentionally endanger bike commuters on the road.

Pick and choose

[jollyllama Posted Aug 2nd 2008 9:16PM]

You know what I love about that Seattle Times headline? That it's about cyclists injuring a driver, not mentioning the guy he intentionally ran over that started the situation. But hey, sensationalism sells papers to scared conservative eastsiders, right?

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 2nd 2008 9:48PM]

@eric - thanks for validating two wrongs make a right

@jollyllama - the driver of the car made a police report. let's assume that he's in the wrong and he did in fact hit someone first. why didn't that person make a police report? the only reason I can think of is that it didn't happen that way.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 2nd 2008 3:00PM]

This is super commendable.

It has previously been Law Enforcement's position that "You can't trust that new fangled technology; you have no idea what happened before or after the cameras were rolling. We need to ignore all citizen video evidence because it is just sensationalism."

That's BS and they know it.

Hurrah New York!

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 2nd 2008 4:04PM]

Good ol' NYPD..... you cant live withem you cant live without them. Im getting a brand spankin new N95 next month so this should be useful. lol

[Wwhat Posted Aug 2nd 2008 4:47PM]

How convenient, any time the cops misbehave and there's videos of it the people will bring them in for erasure and such accidents, or since the cops have the address of the owner they can 'advise' them to keep it quiet.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 2nd 2008 10:16PM]

+ photoshop

[kagai Posted Aug 2nd 2008 11:18PM]

We need to institute a Judge system and avoid all of this junk. Judge, jury, and executioner all in one. "I am the Law!"

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 4th 2008 11:25AM]

That's a laugh! The NYPD, known as one of the police forces most likely to physically abuse press photographers is now asking people to become tattle tales.

The utter hypocrisy boggles the mind.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 6th 2008 9:37PM]

I think the NYPD are just knee-jerking and recoiling from this scandal. They want you to send them videos like this because they don't want them winding up on the 11 o-clock news and catching them blind-side again.

Despite all the technology people carry on their person, the average citizen is being controlled, manipulated and intentionally disinformed far more through technology than ever before.